It has been common practice in the digital data storage art to provide magnetic tape units for the storage of digital data. Typically, the drives used with such tapes are required to accelerate the tapes from a stop to a high speed very rapidly on demand of a processing unit. In order to achieve this, it has been the practice of the art to decouple the main mass of tape from the section in the immediate vicinity of the magnetic read/write head by means of vacuum columns.
The continued improvements in speed and size efficiency of digital computers has required that the peripheral devices such as tape memories used with such computers be concomitantly improved. Not only has the density of data recording on magnetic tape been drastically increased in the last decade, but the speeds at which the tapes are required to move and accelerate have similarly been increased by improvements in the processing units. Furthermore, it has been and remains the aim of the art to package tape drives having the highest possible capabilities into the smallest possible space. Therefore, for example, it has been a need of the art for a tape drive which can be fit into the industry-standard 19 inch rack for mounting, as is shown for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,866,855. However, no prior art rack mountable drive incorporates the high speeds (e.g. 125 ips) speeds of other prior art tape drives which do not fit into such a rack, such as that shown in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,854,674 to Herger et al. A proposed high speed rack mounted drive which is substantially as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,093,148 to Urynowicz et al, has not been adequately reliable to solve this need.
Therefore, while rack mounted tape drives have existed in the art, and while high performance tape drives have existed in the art, no reference has shown or taught any way in which both could be combined, since the high speed drives previously available have required more front panel space for vacuum decoupling columns than was available in a 19 inch rack mountable drive.